Reygadas' films explore spirituality and the sublime through the interior lives of men suffering existential crises. He has shot all but one of his films in CinemaScope. With Silent Light, Reygadas competed once more for the Palme d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival,[1] and has become one of the most prominent writer–directors of modern Mexican cinema.

Martin Scorsese called Silent Light "A surprising picture, and a very moving one as well."[2]

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In 1987 Reygadas discovered his filmic passion after watching the films of the Soviet/Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986). He attended Mount St Mary's College, Derbyshire, and later studied law in Mexico. Afterward, he specialized in armed conflicts in London and worked for the United Nations.

In 1997, Reygadas participated in a film competition in Belgium with his first short film, Maxhumain. Shortly after that, in 1999, he began writing his first long film, Japón, which he did not begin to shoot until 2001. The film was presented at the Rotterdam Film Festival and received a special mention for the Caméra d'Or award at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival as well as the Coral Award of the Havana Film Festival.

In 2005 Reygadas filmed Batalla en el Cielo (Battle in Heaven) assisted by Amat Escalante. The film gained worldwide notoriety for its graphic sex. It competed for the Palme d’Or at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.[3]

In 2007 Reygadas filmed Silent Light, which went on to win the Jury Prize at Cannes and is very highly regarded by American filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who considers it a masterpiece of modern cinema.[citation needed]

In 2009 Carlos Reygadas co-produced and co-edited, with the Spanish director and producer Jaime Rosales (Fresdeval Films), the film "El árbol" (The Tree, a Spanish-Mexican co-production), directed by Carlos Serrano Azcona starring as the main character, Bosco Sodi contemporary artist. It was presented at the 2009 Rotterdam Film Festival.

In early 2010, Reygadas announced plans for his next feature film at the Berlin Film Festival, titled Post Tenebras Lux. It is a semi-autobiographical fiction film and is about "feelings, memories, dreams, things I've hoped for, fears, facts of my current life." Reygadas also said of the film in Berlin, reason will intervene as little as possible, like an expressionist painting where you try to express what you're feeling through the painting rather than depict what something looks like." It was shot in Mexico, Britain, Spain, and Belgium, all places where Reygadas has lived. At the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, Reygadas won the Best Director Award for the film.[4]

Japón contains a number of scenes of real animal cruelty and the British Board of Film Classification demanded cuts for its UK release in accordance with the Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act 1937. The excised scenes are described as an unsuccessful attempt to strangle a bird that then stumbles around injured on the ground and a dog being forced to sing along with a song through the application of a painful stimulus.[5] The film also includes an unsimulated scene of a bird being shot down and then killed by having its head torn off and the (off-camera) slaughter of a pig.[6] Reygadas defended these scenes, as well as the explicit sexual encounters in Batalla en el Cielo, saying, "If you think about it, what’s so outrageous about a naked obese woman? There are plenty of astonishing images in other films with flying cars and such… What you find in my films you see any ordinary day: a gas station, a hunter killing an animal, people making love. I’m not trying to impress anyone with those images; they make sense in the context of my films."[7]